This article examines the role of the local «Chinese» market in the community's life of the city micro-district. The authors make an attempt to analyze the «Chinese» market from the standpoint of urban community, determine the significance and function of the market in the city's everyday life, describe mechanisms to identify and determine this market as an ethnically marked locality in the urban space. The main task of the article is to answer the question what representatives of the community mean naming the market as «Chinese» and its perception as ethnic. This approach allows formulating the problem of emergence of new meanings and functions of the «ethnic» markers of urban space. The study is based on a series of focused interviews with residents of the «Irkutsk-II» neighborhood of regional center of Irkutsk region. In the framework of the hypothesis about the network nature of the development of such markets in Siberian cities the authors analyze market «Manchuria» as an ethnic market of the second level, serving the local part of the city. They examine the interrelationship of physical and discursive exclusion of the market from the urban space, as well as practices of interaction of neighborhood residents with the market. Studying the way urban residents perceive “ethnicity” of the “Chinese” market space the authors analyze the sense attributed to visual markers of «ethnicity» of market space by the representatives of the urban community. The authors conclude that the function of ethnic markers in the urban space is changing rapidly: from labeling «ethnic space» to the designation of a specific form of economic life. This process however not only changes the economic practices of urbanites, but also brings more profound changes to life of the Siberian city. The ethnic market is becoming a tool of designing a collective image of «The East», which includes elements of culture of South-East Asia and Central Asian countries, word picture and media images. This leads to change in the functions of ethnic markets: from «place of meeting» and «crossroads of cultures» they become a tool of orientalization of Siberian city, its involvment in constructing «The East.» space.